It was great to see Elle McNicoll's book A Kind of Spark get even more much-deserved recognition this week when it won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize 2021. It's a far call from McNicoll's first experiences of publishing and being repeatedly told that people didn’t want to read about an autistic heroine. 

Published by the small but very very mighty independent Knights Of who exist to make books for every kid and champion diversity and inclusion, it certainly does that! When 11 year old Addie, who is autistic, learns about the 16th century women who were persecuted for witchcraft, she starts to lobby for a local memorial in her small Scottish village. With the help of a new girl at school, she fights valiantly against injustice and oppression. 

Autistic herself, frustrated by a lack of disabled heroines in books, McNicoll created Addie to fulfil her desire to see a neurodivergent main character in children's fiction. She is a character McNicoll would have loved to read as a child: “I was a voracious reader, but I never saw the word autistic written in a book, or autistic girls. We had [Mark Haddon’s] The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, but we never saw neurodivergent girls.”

Originally published in June 2020 A Kind of Spark has already won the Blue Peter prize for best story, and was named as Blackwell’s book of 2020 and this makes a triple crown with the Waterstone's Prize.

To find more books featuring autistic characters, check out our 25 Books Featuring Autism Collection.